Children Flood Kenyan Schools To Get a Free Education

The
first day of classes at one of Kenya's best public schools would have
been enough to test the nerves of the most seasoned educator.

More than 3,000 new pupils showed up at Olympic Primary School in
Nairobi that January afternoon, straining the ability of school leaders
in the capital city— and in the 17,000 public schools across
Kenya—to meet a bold promise of this nation's new president:
access to free primary education.

Angry parents shouted at teachers, and some threatened to burn the
principal's office down when they were told classes were overflowing
and no more children would be allowed to enroll.

Now, more than a million new students are flooding into the nation's
public schools as the National Rainbow Coalition government, under the
leadership of President Mwai Kibaki, who took office in December, faces
the task of making good on a pledge of free schooling. That pledge has
been touted for decades by Kenyan leaders and in the paper promises of
international education agreements, but has never been fully realized
in the East African country of 29 million people. Primary education
covers the 1st through 8th grades.

The push to provide free primary schooling in Kenya comes at a time
when several international organizations, among them the Global
Campaign for Education—a group that includes the National
Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—are
calling on the United States and other wealthy nations to increase
support for poorer nations as they work to provide education for all
children.

Kenyans who work with schools and international organizations
express optimism about the new government's ability to make the
initiative work even as they warn of the difficulties ahead.

The country, for instance, faced a severe teacher shortage even
before the universal primary education plan was enacted. In addition,
girls have historically been shortchanged when it comes to education,
as families, particularly in rural areas, rely on their daughters to
stay home and help raise siblings. Making the challenge even greater is
the pandemic of HIV and AIDS, which affects more than 2 million people
in the country.

Ogada Kojwang, the national director of the Kenyan office of the
Christian Children's Fund, an international group that works on
education, health, and early-childhood issues there and worldwide, said
schools were clearly overwhelmed by the arrival of new students. While
most classes are set up for about 40 pupils, the introduction of free
schooling has swelled class sizes in some cases to more than 100.

"In the past, because of school fees, many of the poor people would
give preference to food instead of sending kids to school," Mr. Kojwang
said. "There is a very big influx in schools now, and the school
authorities have children going to school in shifts.

"In some schools, students learn under trees, out in the open. It
has been dry, but when it starts raining, they will have a
problem."

But Mr. Kojwang has faith in the country's new president, who has
brought hope to Kenyans increasingly disillusioned by the corruption
and mismanagement that for many were the hallmarks of former President
Daniel Arap Moi's 24-year rule.

"This time, the government is committed," he said. "The last
government was half-hearted. They said they were going to implement
free education, but when it came to commitment, they lacked the
political will."

Tough Choices

The vision for free, primary-age schooling has been a part of the
political conversation in Kenya since at least the 1960s.

When the country gained its independence from Britain in 1963,
Kenya's first post- colonial president, the legendary Mzee Jomo Jomo
Kenyatta, waived fees at schools in the most impoverished areas. In
1978, President Moi abolished school fees in all primary schools.

By the early 1980s, enrollment in primary schools soared, and most
primary-age children were attending school. But the reality of making
universal education work was severely straining resources. A spike in
oil prices and fallout from government corruption helped send the
economies of Kenya and other African nations reeling.

The national government shifted the financial responsibility for
social programs such as education and health care to local communities
that were forced to charge user fees. For many families in a country
where more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day,
those fees pushed education out of reach. Some advocacy groups argue
that the policies of international institutions like the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund exacerbated the problem.

Njoki Njoroge Njehu, the director of a Washington-based group called
50 Years Is Enough, a coalition of organizations that advocates debt
cancellation in poor countries, said those institutions pushed Kenya
and other heavily indebted countries in Africa and elsewhere to accept
austere fiscal measures that have had devastating consequences.

"It's been an ongoing crisis, and it means a lot of people have not
been able to send their kids to school," said Ms. Njehu, a Kenyan who
taught high school in the 1980s. "The question became, do your kids
eat, or get health care, or go to school?"

Only last week the Kenyan government, citing concerns about its
education and health-care obligations, launched a debt-relief campaign,
according to the newspaper the DailyNation.

Birger Fredriksen, a senior education adviser for the World Bank
African regional team, acknowledged that measures to help Kenya and
other African nations reduce deficits may have contributed to cuts in
spending on programs such as education. But, he said, as many African
economies crashed, and mismanagement became endemic, international
lenders became wary of providing loans without also requiring more
fiscally sound policies.

"The policies did have an impact on education and health budgets,
but it's not easy to see what the alternative would be," Mr. Fredriksen
said. "The alternative would have been for rich countries to increase
their development assistance. It didn't seem like the industrial
countries were ready to do this."

The World Bank is providing about $50 million in the form of a grant
to the Kenyan government to help pay for textbooks and other supplies
as the free education plan is implemented.

Other African nations that in recent years have waived user fees for
education also face soaring enrollments and the challenges that go
along with them. In 1994, school fees were waived in Malawi. Primary
enrollment increased from 1.9 million to about 3 million a year later.
When Uganda dropped user fees, primary school enrollments swelled from
2.4 million in 1996 to 6.3 million in 2000.

Long-Term Plans

George Ingram, the executive director of the Washington-based Basic
Education Coalition, a group of 16 development organizations that seeks
more aid from developed countries for early-childhood and primary
education in foreign-assistance programs, said that achieving universal
primary education is a daunting task for many countries.

"There has been progress, but it hasn't been as rapid and as deep as
people would want," Mr. Ingram said. "You start with the fundamental
difficulty of development, which in countries that are torn by civil
strife can't adequately feed their populations, much less educate
them."

One out of every 16 of the world's children of primary school age do
not attend school, according to the coalition. It formed after the 2000
World Education Forum held in Dakar, Senegal, to help advance the
Education for All goal adopted by 180 nations, including Kenya, to have
all primary-age children in school by 2015.

A report released last week about an initiative agreed upon at last
year's spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank to improve the
capacity of poor countries' education systems points out how much work
lies ahead.

"The fast-track initiative has reached its limits in terms of what
can be achieved without additional donor resources and far-reaching
changes in how aid is planned and delivered," contends the report by
the London-based international-development agency ActionAid.

Andiwo Obondoh, the coordinator of the Elimu Yetu coalition, a
consortium of education groups working throughout Kenya, said the
discussion in Kenya now must be about more than simply access to
school.

"The question of quality is important," said Mr. Obondoh, a former
high school teacher in Kenya. "The government must ensure we have
quality learning materials. The main challenge is getting resources to
all the public schools. We need to have long-term plans around
this."

Coverage of cultural understanding and international issues in
education is supported in part by the Atlantic Philanthropies.

Vol. 22, Issue 31, Page 8

Published in Print: April 16, 2003, as Children Flood Kenyan Schools To Get a Free Education

In January 2003, UNICEF donated
$2.5
million toward free primary education in Kenya. "The new
government's education initiative is a milestone and we are heartened
at the speed with which the government has moved to fulfill its
election promise," a UNICEF spokeperson said.

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